10 hours ago
3
As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House next week with Elon Musk at his side, the pair are planning to write the next chapter in US spaceflight history with an ambitious agenda that includes the first human footprints on Mars.
How many of their grandiose aspirations get cemented into official US space policy and what gets left on the launchpad remains to be seen. But analysts envision a lively few years from the partnership between Musk, the enthusiastic billionaire founder of SpaceX, and Trump, who exploited US achievements in space during his first term for some jingoistic flag-waving.
Trump made space force the first new US military service in seven decades, and signed an executive order reviving the dormant National Space Council for the first time since 1993.
“From what we know and have seen, Trump seems very interested in space. I don’t know if he’s necessarily interested in the details of the policy so much as he sees space as a potent symbol of American power and capability,” said Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society.
“It’s interesting that when he speaks about space, he always talks about Mars, and sending people to Mars. That may be part of that alignment with Musk.”
At a campaign rally in North Carolina in September, the president-elect was already clear about his expectations.
“Elon, get those rocket ships going because we want to reach Mars before the end of my term,” he said, urging Musk to hasten his already optimistic project for a crewed landing on the red planet by 2028, and a self-sustaining community there within two decades.
In reality, Dreier and other analysts believe, the aspirations of Trump’s second term are likely to be much more grounded – even though American astronauts are on the verge of returning to the moon for the first time since 1972 through Nasa’s Artemis program.
Trump, of course, will relish the prospect of being in the White House when the US flag is again planted on the lunar surface, now scheduled for mid-2027, and in April next year when Artemis 2 makes a planned crewed flypast of the moon.
But any substantive deviation from the agenda of the outgoing Biden administration, which some have predicted could include the cancellation of the over-budget and much delayed Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that is the backbone of Nasa’s moon-to-Mars vision, could be slow to come, or not at all.
“If you do a radical change now, you actually push back the landing on the moon timeline. You’re going back to square one,” Dreier said.
“Most of the hardware for the SLS of Artemis 2 and 3 is built, so it makes more sense to run those through [even] if you want to change them.
“Maybe the right way to think of it is you might hear intentions for major change, statements around major change, and goals for major change. Then the outcome, that’s the hard part, getting to actually implementing it. Pretty much any Nasa policy requires a 60-vote threshold in the Senate, so you need some Democrats to support you. Space exploration isn’t inherently partisan, but could easily become so.”
A key player in the direction of Trump’s second-term space agenda is going to be another billionaire entrepreneur, Jared Isaacman, nominated last month to be Nasa administrator. Dreier said he will need to become a consensus builder in Congress, and manage the space agency’s increasingly intertwined and demanding relationships with international partners and private contractors, including Boeing and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
If confirmed, Isaacman’s first order of business will be a top-to-toe review of where Nasa’s various programs, human spaceflight and research, stand. For that reason alone, other experts believe any immediate change of direction in US space policy is unlikely.
“He needs to do a stock taking of where they are, looking at the Artemis program and its cost and schedule, which is obviously a concern with China and its rapid progress,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, who served as executive secretary of the National Space Council during the first Trump administration.
“What changes come out of that initial hard look are still to be determined. The broad space policy brushstrokes are largely already present. Artemis, space force, relying on commercial, all that is fine. The real challenge now for this term is really implementation and execution.
“Someone with Isaacman’s strong technical skills, someone who’s led a major organization as he has, and of course, his personal spaceflight experience – he’s walked the walk, not just talked about stuff – are I think what the agency needs.”
Pace also cautioned against speculation about what the Trump-Musk axis was planning to do. Early predictions, reported last month by Ars Technica, include scrapping SLS in part or wholesale, and handing off moon and Mars missions to Musk’s cheaper, yet more powerful and fast-developing Starship rocket.
“There’s an adage in Washington that those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know,” he said.
“I wouldn’t categorically rule out anything, because the Trump administration has freedom of action, but any of this stuff you hear beforehand take with large dollop of salt.
“The transition teams are meeting, putting together reports, identifying issues and things that might pop up, looking at upcoming flights, safety aboard the international space station, anything that could be an event.
“But the most interesting time you’ll actually see something more definitive is probably when Jared Isaacman’s name goes up to the Hill, the questions he’s going to be asked at his confirmation hearing, and how he responds.”
Not everybody is waiting to see how the Trump-Musk agenda for space plays out. Last week, the Republican Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, made a bold pitch for the new president to move Nasa headquarters to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) at Cape Canaveral.
“They have this massive building in Washington DC, and nobody goes to it, so why not just shutter it and move everybody down here?” DeSantis said at a press conference to announce a partnership between a consortium of space research Florida universities and KSC officials, reported by the Sun-Sentinel.
A possible amalgamation of Nasa centers, and moving headquarters to a field center while maintaining only a minimal presence in the capital, are among the ideas Ars Technica said the incoming administration was considering.
